Ashes 2013: life comes full circle as DRS evokes the very controversy it was meant to stamp out

Edgbaston, August 2005, in a parallel universe. Australia need three runs to
win. Stephen Harmison bowls a bouncer. Michael Kasprowicz gets a faint glove
on the ball. Geraint Jones tumbles to his left to take the catch.

Think again: Bard Haddin's dismissal after a review was something of an anticlimaxPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

But wait. All of a sudden, England’s celebrations are cut short. Kasprowicz is making the T‑sign with his arms to request a review.

On replay, it emerges that his glove was off the bat handle when it made contact with the ball. Under the laws, he is not out. Next ball, with a dull inevitability, Harmison gives away five wides and the match. Australia claim a 2‑0 series lead and go on to retain The Ashes comfortably. At the time of writing, Freddie Flintoff is a nightclub bouncer in Preston.

Eight years on, we wake to find the nightmare has been made real. England’s instant of victory yesterday was a curiously unsatisfying experience.

Not, perhaps, for James Anderson, a conjurer in whites, who more than any other player on the field deserved his moment of sweaty jubilee. Nor for the bellowing, barbecued fans at Trent Bridge, who, with their ebbing and gushing undulations of noise, could validly count themselves as participants.

But for the viewer, there was just the merest whiff of anticlimax to the finale. After three years of build‑up, 384 overs of cricket and roughly two dozen mentions of David Gower’s butler, the result of the first Ashes Test was handed down to us from a dark upstairs room by a man whose face was not seen for the entire five days of the match.

As England’s players began their delayed celebrations, a thought struck: was this sport? “Jones ... Bowden!” was Benaud’s now-famous description of the final wicket at Edgbaston in 2005. For some reason “Erasmus ... Dar!”, with the ellipsis denoting a pause of between two to three minutes to check on Hot Spot, does not have quite the same ring to it.

None of this should be interpreted as a simple diatribe against the Decision Review System, which has increased the accuracy of decision making, generated plenty of genuine sporting drama in its own right and annoyed India immeasurably, which is of course the most important thing.

But Test cricket’s first genuine “HAL 9000” moment (“I’m sorry Aleem, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that”) illustrated the uniquely complex relationship between the sport and television: a far cry from the days when technology meant a box in the corner of the screen showing the batsmen running.

It was television, after all, that eventually demanded the incorporation of technology into the game. But the four years of DRS have seen the evolution of a curious subplot, a game-within-a-game that nobody could quite have foreseen at its outset.

If DRS was intended to stymie the long, unwinnable debate over umpiring decisions, then the endless replays and gnashed teeth that appeared to accompany every close of play on Sky Sports provided their own rejoinder.

Controversy has a habit of seeping into sport like water into a crack. On Saturday evening, the commentary team even wondered aloud whether a shrewder umpire than Aleem Dar might have covered his back by giving Stuart Broad out in England’s second innings, given that England still had reviews remaining and Australia did not. This, clearly, was bananas.

More interestingly, the subjectivity afforded to umpires has increasingly made them legitimate targets for criticism. Shane Warne’s Twitter attack on Dar was the latest in a growing trend.

The day surely cannot be far off where umpires are imputed with the same game‑changing powers as the referee in rugby union: active protagonists with their own style and character traits, rather than passive messengers of the rules.

We shall examine Sky Sports’ Ashes coverage in greater detail over the course of the series, but for now a parting thought. As Brad Haddin marshalled Australia’s seemingly infinite tail towards victory, a number of commentators evoked parallels with that Edgbaston Test match.

How ironic, then, that the same technology that handed England victory yesterday would have denied it to them eight years ago.